Traffic offloading procedure management is a key component of mission critical Public Safety (PS) communication systems. There is an expectation that PS systems can manage wireless resources and grant calls if the required resources are available and find resources if the required resources are not. Further, there is an expectation that PS communication should be available via broadband systems, such as a 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) LTE (Long Term Evolution) communication system. By providing for PS communications over broadband systems, better protection is provided for first responders at an incident scene, such as police, fire and ambulance personnel, along with protection of the communities they serve.
It is expected that at an incident scene where there is a high user density, aside from the primary wireless network such as PS LTE, multiple secondary wireless networks will coexist. To better serve the PS personnel, it is imperative that congestion be managed in the primary wireless networks by offloading certain traffic to secondary networks on the scene. Traffic offloading procedures rely on multi-mode devices which include support of primary and secondary networks, connecting to multiple networks simultaneously and transmitting and receiving a set of bearer traffic on primary network while transmitting and receiving a second set of bearer traffic on one or more secondary networks.
Many PS personnel, especially during an incident scene, may use group applications such as Group voice calls, Group Push-to-talk, Group video streaming, Group data sharing etc., on the scene. Very often some of these group traffic types may create a much higher localized congestion in the primary network due to higher user density. Therefore, there exists a need to harness localized group communications sessions as candidates for traffic offloading to ease congestion in the primary network during high user density scenarios such as an incident scene.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and/or relative positioning of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present invention. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention. It will further be appreciated that certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required. Those skilled in the art will further recognize that references to specific implementation embodiments such as “circuitry” may equally be accomplished via replacement with software instruction executions either on general purpose computing apparatus (e.g., CPU) or specialized processing apparatus (e.g., DSP). It will also be understood that the terms and expressions used herein have the ordinary technical meaning as is accorded to such terms and expressions by persons skilled in the technical field as set forth above except where different specific meanings have otherwise been set forth herein.